Trump's commercial defeat against Beijing

White House officials are not talking about their commercial defeat against China right now! However, most analysts believe that Donald Trump has failed to achieve his business and economic goals in the fight against Beijing. As CNN reported recently, The US-China trade war is rocking America's manufacturing industry. It's denting profits for major companies like Hasbro and Caterpillar. And farmers are hurting badly. Yet Peter Navarro, a trade adviser to President Donald Trump, downplayed the pain from the trade war and stressed the need to stay unified against China.

"We are dealing with a strategic rival -- and they are trying to buckle our knees," Navarro told CNN's Jim Sciutto at the CITIZEN by CNN conference in New York.

Navarro was quick to say China's economy is "hurting" and it is, with growth slowing to the weakest pace since 1992 -- but refused to acknowledge the damage at home. Yet the erratic trade war between the United States and China has also exacerbated the global economic slowdown and stung America's factories. The US manufacturing sector in September suffered its worst month in a decade. Executives and economists pinned the blame on the tit-for-tat tariff battle with China. Farmers have been caught in the crossfire, with China halting its purchases of soybeans and other agricultural products in retaliation for tariffs.

What has happened today between the United States and China is rooted in the behaviors of the last two years of the US president with Beijing.US-China relations continue to decline during the Trump presidency. Of course, there were disagreements between Beijing and Washington over security and cyber-security issues at the time of Barack Obama, but the emergence of trade and economic disputes in their bilateral relations should be analyzed "beyond a simple controversy." In other words, from the beginning of 2017 and Trump's presence at the top of the political and executive equations of the United States, we have witnessed the emergence of constant crises and challenges in the relations between Washington and Beijing.

MNA/TT